Clinton was hard. I'll tell you why. The reality is he's probably the
most famous liar of all time. He and his administration did some very
good things, of course, but I could never get this Monica thing
completely out of my mind and it is subtly incorporated in the painting.

If you look at the left-hand side of it there's a mantle in the Oval
Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two
things. It actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that
I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not
when he was there. It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents
a shadow on the office he held, or on him.

And so the Clintons hate the portrait. They want it removed from the
National Portrait Gallery. They're putting a lot of pressure on them.
[Reached by phone Thursday, a spokeswoman from the National Portrait
Gallery denied that.]

What a brilliant example of the power of an artist to make history! This will make this portrait the most famous and visited and chuckled about Presidential portrait at the NPG! Velazquez did something similar with a variety of hidden (and some later deleted) clues in Las Meninas centuries ago, and one of them, when discovered 500 years later, changed the Spanish crown's line to the throne from the first male born to the first born, period! I couldn't wait to contact a good friend at the NPG and ask him/her if the claim about the pressure being put on the NPG is true! Let me see if we/she/him can find some internal NPG emails on the subject that we can publish here!Read the article here.